Longing

Espinosa­

Prologue

Paris, 1962

To escape the cold which seared through her, Rosa walked into a café on the Quai Malaquais. It was crowded. The rooms had a warm, yellow, electric glow. The mirrors, which were characteristic of Parisian eating and drinking establishments, reflected her image.

She was a gaunt young woman with streaming black hair, dressed in a grey coat, and supported by shoes with very slender heels.

Two men sat at a table towards the front. One was plump and dark and jovial. The other was thin, with sharply delineated features and a certain intensity. He reminded her of the sea—his was the face of a man who lived by the sea. Something propelled her towards him. But they were deep in conversation and did not notice her.

Rosa walked through the entire café, as if looking for a place to sit, but her mind was fixed on the man with the seafarer’s face. Once again she passed by their table. Won’t you sit down and join us in a glass of wine? asked the plump, dark man, glancing up at her.

Yes, she said. Thank you. I will.

The slender man, whose name was Antonio, and Rosa caressed in the back of a taxi while they sped towards his apartment. She sobbed because this kind of thing had happened so many times before. She despaired over her promiscuity. These casual encounters had produced a certain frigidness in her. But sex, no matter how unsatisfying, brought in its wake intimacy that she craved.

What’s the matter?

I don’t know, she said, unable to tell him the truth.

"Pauvre petite. I could feel the electricity you sent out when you walked behind me at the table. I could feel it in my spine."

A week later, as if he sensed the full intensity of her loneliness, he asked her to move in with him.

PART ONE

Paris

CHAPTER ONE

In mid-November 1963 the wedding took place in the Mairie of the Fourth Arrondissement in Paris.

Rosa wore a yellow print dress she had bought on sale at Monoprix. Antonio wore a charcoal flannel suit. She was seven months pregnant.

It was a mass wedding, and they repeated their vows along with six other couples under the direction of a grey-haired magistrate. Afterwards they received a slender maroon-bound booklet entitled Livret de Famille, which recorded their marriage in ornate handwriting.

Livret de Famille. Family booklet. It seemed strange to Rosa to think of them both as a family, along with the mass in her stomach that kicked and stirred.

Antonio kissed her quickly on the lips. His face was impassive. Glacial.

Congratulations! I see a little one is on the way, said the magistrate.

Bien sûr, said Antonio.

In France, Antonio told her, people did not take these things as they did in America—here it was not unusual, even in the upper-middle classes, to be married after you were pregnant.

Oh God, why the hell did you marry me? Why did I want you to? But it was your idea. For the baby. I hate you. I hate myself. I wish I were far away, and what am I ever going to do with a baby, a little monster to tyrannize over me the rest of my life? I’m scared.

But she had not wanted an abortion. She ate yoghurt and liver and fresh strawberries in quantity, until one evening as she spooned yoghurt into her mouth—she was scheduled to go for an abortion next week, but just in case she didn’t, she felt she owed it to the unborn creature to nourish it—he said to her, The baby is too healthy. Making you eat like this. We’ll get married.

They were between fights.

They fought at least every two or three days, and after each battle she was reduced to tears, to speechless rage, fear, and hopelessness.

Fighting, she thought, instead of making love.

They rarely made love.

Never had she been with someone with whom she had such an awful sexual relationship. How ironic to marry him. Yes, ironic. While he murmured of blonde, blue-eyed beauties who turned him on.

As they walked along the Rue Saint Antoine back to their apartment where friends of Antonio’s would meet them for lunch, she felt terribly isolated, as if the two of them were alone together in an endless rushing grey mass. It seemed as if there were no one else in the entire universe.

Before Rosa met Antonio there had been psychiatrists and a terrible year inside an institution with pastel walls. They admitted her when, after asking if she heard voices, she admitted hearing an occasional murmur. They seemed so interested that she enlarged. And why are you hiding your face? they asked. Startled, she put her hands in her lap. When I stare in front of me, she said, everything gets blurry. I feel paralyzed. People seem as if they were cut out of cardboard. Do you ever think of killing yourself? they asked. Yes, she said.

The rudeness of a bus driver on the way to their office had made her want to dissolve. Everything overwhelmed her. Yes, she said, an institution would be all right. The walls would be comforting. She would not need to make decisions. For a while she would be protected.

But she did not hear loud voices, nor did she hallucinate the way patients did in the locked psychotic ward upstairs. Her voices were occasional muffled sounds, a paranoid amplification of what lay within the atmosphere.

She saw a therapist three times a week. For the first time she met people her own age who suffered her inadequacies, even some who suffered terrible things of which she had no comprehension.

Nothing much seemed to change. The green grass and the hot sun in the summer seemed healing. When a year was up they released her.

It cost her parents thousands of dollars, a large part of what they had recently inherited from her grandfather. She reflected that perhaps she would not have been confined so long if she had been a ward of the State, because the hospital received three times as much for each private patient.

Why hadn’t she realized this at the time? She had wandered around the hospital grounds as if she were anaesthetized, overpowered by the harshness of everything outside. She did not want her parents to spend so much money on her.

She too inherited money from her grandfather. With it she flew to Europe to get away from the accusing, interrogating voices, the turmoil of the past. She felt worthless. The only way she could affirm herself was to write the feelings that pressed down on her. But her emotions were too intense, the anxiety too acute. She wrote hundreds, thousands of pages but failed to find cohesive forms for the chaos that churned inside her. Even the power of expression had been taken away.

She was lonely and sick with a bad chest cold that would not go away when Antonio asked her to live with him. He cooked her chicken soup and gave her shots of vitamin B-12 to strengthen her. He was comfort. A hand reached out to save her from drowning, just when she was going under.

He was fifteen years older than she, had never married, and he came from Chile. He was a writer who supported himself in Paris by doing odd jobs—apartment painting, photographic portraits, an occasional piece of journalism.

After she moved in, his economic situation became difficult. He increasingly depended on the monthly income that was sent to her from what remained of her inheritance. When she resisted giving money, he became angry and accused her of alienating his friends with her attacks of hystérie. His friends were his sources of jobs. He used to be invited out to eat. He no longer was. She broke the spigot in his apartment which supplied illegal but free gas. Living with her cost more in all ways.

She grew confused. She could no longer discern what was true from what was false. She did not want him to leave her. He took a more intense interest in her than anyone else ever had. He praised her, stormed against her shortcomings, became outraged when he felt she was wronged. No one had ever before been outraged on her behalf.

After all it was not money that she’d earned or in any particular way merited, but money bequeathed as a tax-saving stratagem to each child and grandchild by her mother’s father, a dapper gentleman whom she always pictured in a straw hat with white hair, dressed in a seersucker suit with a tennis racket under his arm. He had been gently unconcerned with the chaos of the world.

Antonio wasted the money on expensive meals in restaurants, vintage wines, and on needy friends.

Why not? she thought. Better to spend the money like this than on shrinks. Soon the money would run out. Thank God. She looked forward to that time. Then they would be rid of the false cushion that shielded them from reality.

He alone saw who she truly was, underneath her wisps of flying hair, underneath what he called her hystérie.

She ached for him.

She wanted to heal him, as he was healing her. No one understood how his rages healed her. He raged when he was wounded. He raged because he cared about her, because he was too sensitive, as if he lived without a skin.

"Well, Petite, are you satisfied now that I’ve married you?" he asked teasingly.

She fingered the cheap wedding ring on her finger. They had bought it too at Monoprix. It was not real gold because they could not afford such an expense. They must save for the baby, and Antonio was just a pauvre gar.

She wanted to shout, No, damn you. I’m not satisfied. But an immense relief flooded her. For months they had tried to get married. Time after time they had gone to the Palais de Justice to apply for a license but had succeeded only after Antonio bribed several petty officials. The French did not encourage foreigners to marry who seemed likely to become a burden on their socialized economy.

After each of their fights Antonio would threaten to leave her.

She wanted the baby to be legitimate, even if they did not stay married. She wanted the baby to bear Antonio’s name. Otherwise the humiliation, the hostility of the rest of the world, its contempt, would be unbearable.

They walked past small open air markets, past the ancient Catholic church she loved with its beautifully carved Virgin in a darkened niche that smelled of incense, where the stained glass gleamed in soft hues. They passed the outskirts of the Jewish Quarter. It was cloudy and cold. Over the yellow dress she wore a dark blue coat. Her hair hung loose over her shoulders. Her lips were chapped.

She glanced again at Antonio who was holding her by the arm. He was slender and had a long, pointed face with classical features. Chestnut hair fell loosely over his forehead. His face was weatherbeaten. His eyes were icy bluish-grey. He had the look of a mariner, she thought. In fact, he had grown up on the seacoast of southern Chile. He was so handsome, so deft and graceful in his movements, his gestures, his mentality. When he was not in one of his crazy, drunken, nasty moods, his intuition was keen.

What did he see in her? She felt clumsy, felt her face red and shiny with cold. Her eyebrows were too thick, her nose too short, her lips too thick. Beside him she felt coarse. Her hair and her clothes were never quite right. Everything came across to the world as a trifle askew, off-key. At times she wished she could jump out of her skin from the frustration of trying simply to exist as a human being. Antonio held the keys to secret doors. He alone could release her from this prison of her awkwardness, could strip away illusions that blinded her. He might even make her beautiful, make her someone that people could love.

They walked through the open door of the courtyard and across the cobblestones, their heels clattering. Philippe, Anna, and Elena were waiting for them, huddled together, laughing and talking. Elena, clad only in a sweater and skirt, was dancing up and down to keep warm.

Jean! Philippe yelled up at a window on the second floor across the way from Antonio’s apartment. Jean, the photographer, stuck his pale, round face out. They’re here!

I’ll come in a minute, Jean said.

Philippe was a poet who worked at night at Orly as a control operator. He had craggy features and was nearly bald although only in his late twenties. He wore a ski cap and heavy sweater. Anna, his wife, seemed always to be secretly smiling to herself in a pleasant, almost childlike way. She had soft straight brown hair and even features.

They climbed up the creaking wooden steps to Antonio’s apartment on the fourth floor. Just as they reached the door, Jean ran up and joined them. He clapped Antonio on the shoulder. "Eh bien, mon vieux, how long do you think it will last?"

Antonio glanced at his watch in the light of the hallway window. It’s twelve-fifteen now, he said. Maybe until three o’clock.

They all laughed.

The laughter seemed strained to Rosa. Jean did not seem to like her.

Weary, she sat down on the edge of the bed in the main room.

The apartment looked out over a courtyard where the old women in the building loved to gather and gossip. There were three rooms in the apartment. The front room was bare except for a sink and a long table. In this room Antonio planned to put the baby’s crib as well as a refrigerator.

In the crowded main room the peeling cream-colored paint had been scraped off and the cracks covered with splotches of putty. Antonio was preparing to paint. The walls had been this way for over a month. The main room contained a bed, the dining table, several chairs, a couch, a huge closet with built-in drawers which held all their clothes, and a bookcase in the corner. A small heater hissed next to the bed.

The back room, long and narrow, housed the stove. A blue and white striped shower curtain separated the cooking area from the shower stall and a not-yet-operable toilet that Antonio was installing.

Philippe, who was wandering around the apartment, picked up a faded paperback. "So this is it—your novel, El Sueño de Manuel."

Yes, said Antonio.

Philippe leafed through it. I see it was published in 1956, he said. Quite some time ago, eh? It looks interesting. I read some Spanish. May I borrow it?

It’s yours. You may keep it, said Antonio.

But it’s your only copy! cried Rosa. It upset her that he was so magnanimous, so heedless about his few valuable possessions. The book was out of print.

Be quiet! said Antonio.

We’ll return it, said Anna.

Of course, said Philippe. Your only copy! Say . . . this place you have here isn’t bad. How much do you pay a month?

Two hundred francs. I’m the janitor, said Antonio. I clean out the WCs on each landing, mop the stairs, fix electric lights, talk to the old women.

He courts them, said Anna, giving Antonio a smile that Rosa thought too intimate.

Often when Philippe was at work, Antonio would visit Anna, confide in her. Rosa wondered if they ever made love.

Elena, a large, dark-haired Spanish girl, asked for some toilet paper for the hallway WC.

Rosa got her some.

You could use the new toilet Antonio put in, if it only worked, said Jean.

It needs a special pipe run through to the mainline, said Antonio.

She’s pregnant too, you know, said Anna.

I know, said Antonio.

Do you know who the father is?

She told me it’s the man who used to share her room on the Boul Mich—the one she swore up and down last month had never touched her, Antonio said. He spit a fleck of tobacco out of his mouth onto the red tile floor. "Vive la maternité! he said. Shall we drink to la maternité?"

There was a loud knock on the door. It was Roland and Françoise. Françoise, a plump, flushed blonde in her thirties, worked in real estate. Roland was a tall, slender man around the same age who made experimental films in a loft near the Bastille. Françoise gave Antonio and Rosa a huge box, inside of which were a dozen wine glasses packed in straw. Ah thank you, how kind you are, said Antonio.

Yes, thank you very much, said Rosa. Antonio commanded her to rinse out the glasses so they could use them. Anna and Françoise helped her dry them.

Rosa sat down on the edge of the bed again to rest. The baby kicked inside her.

You’re so skinny, said Anna.

She can’t keep anything down, said Antonio.

They clustered around the dining table with its rickety legs while Antonio poured champagne for everyone.

Rosa, get the chicken! he shouted.

Repressing an impulse to scream out against the way he was ordering her around, she went into the back room where two large roast chickens rested on a table next to the stove. She’d cooked the meat last night and had to leave it out, hoping the air was cold enough so it wouldn’t spoil. She took the wild rice that Antonio cooked this morning out of the warm oven, carved slices of chicken, and poured salad dressing over the endive, watercress, and tomatoes. As she handled the food, she felt queasy. The baby was so heavy inside her stomach.

Towards dessert Mohammed arrived. He was drunk, bleary-eyed, dressed in ragged trousers, a torn sweater, and a golf cap. He was waving a wine bottle. With great solemnity he said, Congratulations, Madame Cortes de los Piños, and he smacked Rosa on the temple with a wet kiss. He smelled unwashed, with alcohol on his breath.

Antonio introduced him to the others. He told them that he and Mohammed were going into business together as handymen. The guests laughed. You’re going to put in more toilets that don’t work? asked Philippe.

Antonio started to protest. Rosa reached for the bottle to refill her glass. No more champagne for you, he said. It’s not healthy for the little one on the way.

True, she already had a headache. She did not like to drink very much but wanted to ease the tension. She was angry with the others for not taking Antonio seriously. Yet she herself dreaded the outcome of this new venture.

It seemed to consist of Antonio and Mohammed going out to drink until the early hours of the morning, and God knows, Antonio did enough of that anyway. Later this afternoon he and Mohammed were going to look at an apartment belonging to Mohammed’s aunt in Belleville that needed painting.

You are a journalist. You have written a novel, said Françoise, and yet you’re painting apartments and putting in toilets and showers for a living.

What else can I do in Paris? asked Antonio. "I’m also writing an article on the reaction in Paris to Kennedy’s assassination for La Nación. He gestured towards his typewriter on the corner bookshelf, covered with a sheaf of papers. Maybe it will be published in six months and pay one hundred francs—enough to buy a few groceries."

It seems a shame, said Françoise.

Rosa thought of the hundreds of hours of work Antonio had put into their apartment and of the entire days they had wandered around Paris looking at parts of sinks, showers, toilets in the hardware sections of department stores and at plumbing supply outlets. He threw himself into this work as if he wanted to forget everything else, and his frequent failures aroused his rage. She was unable to write at all, or even to read while he worked on the plumbing, because he insisted that she participate.

Once he had torn the Tibetan Book of the Dead from her hands and tossed it out the window, to the shocked delight of the old women below. Then he stood over her, pregnant as she was, and forced her to mop up the floor in the back room on her hands and knees. She wept as she mopped. Afterwards he said, "I did that because I love you. I care about you. You’ve been spoiled, and I’m making you into a normal woman. I want you to be sensitive to my needs."

Furious, she had turned her back. He’d grabbed her. Let’s go out and have a drink, he’d said. He had kissed her on the lips. Who loves you?

You do, she had murmured, still furious and in a state of shock, but somehow convinced that he was right.

Now he was suggesting that they all go out to a café. Francoise and Roland said they had to leave.

Just a minute, said Antonio. "Before you do, I want you to realize that if it’s a boy, I want a briss, which is a Jewish circumcision ceremony."

I want the baby christened Catholic, Rosa said.

Why? asked Antonio. You’re Jewish.

In name only, she said. I’ve never been inside a Jewish temple. I want the baby to be christened Catholic because almost every day since I became pregnant I’ve gone to the church on the Rue Saint Antoine. It’s so beautiful there. It calms me. I pray in front of the Virgin. I want the baby christened.

She’s a romantic, said Philippe.

She knows nothing about Catholicism, said Antonio. Damn the Catholics. I was raised by Jesuits and by a mother who was a religious fanatic but who had no heart.

I was raised by Jews who pretended not to be, said Rosa. I have no sense of what the Jewish religion is all about. . ..

I really must go, said Francoise.

Come on, let’s go out and have a drink, said Antonio. "Come on Rosa, Mohammed, Philippe, Jean. Your purse, Rosa. Do you have ten francs?. . . Elena, you have no coat! It’s too cold for you to go out like that! He put his arm around Elena and caressed her stomach, moving his hand up to her breasts. Rosa stifled a scream of protest. Rosa, he said, turning to her, take your trench coat out of the closet. . . . Elena, try Rosa’s coat on."

The coat, a trifle too large for Rosa, fit Elena perfectly. Elena twirled around in it after she had buttoned it and buckled the belt. Elena was so pretty with her glossy dark curls, so chic, so frighteningly self-assured. Rosa did not like Antonio giving away her coat, but then she rarely wore it and Elena needed it.

She felt queasy in the pit of her stomach. The baby stirred and kicked. Poor baby. Get born soon, baby, before it gets any worse. She rubbed a spot beneath her left eye where Antonio hit her four nights ago after an especially fierce argument. Luckily the bruise had healed in time for the marriage ceremony.

Much later that night, while Antonio was out with Mohammed and she was alone in the apartment, she thought of going out herself, but when she tried the front door found out that Antonio had locked her in, perhaps inadvertently. He had taken the only key, a large, old-fashioned one he claimed he could not get duplicated. On occasion Rosa had climbed in and out through the window in the front room which led to a window on the landing, after walking precariously over the gabled roof. It was too dark and too cold to try this now, and the baby felt too heavy inside her.

The dim lights of the apartment oppressed her. She could barely see to read or write, and her fingers were numb with cold. She turned the heater up, but that didn’t help. Finally she curled up in bed and tried to rest. Antonio had a record of Gershwin’s An American in Paris which he played over and over again. She put this on the stereo.

She must have fallen asleep because she felt someone shaking her, and when she opened her eyes, she looked into Antonio’s face and smelled the wine on his breath. He needed a shave, she thought, even though he had shaved only yesterday. His beard grew so fast. Tenderly he stroked her soft hair. Do you know, he said, once I had a dream that you and I were skating along, gliding so smoothly. . . .

Stop it! she shouted, pummeling his chest. Stop it! Stop treating me like this! You locked me in and you gave away my coat!

He drew away from her and raised his fist as if he were going to strike her, then looked at his hand as if in a daze and lowered it. You’re pregnant, he said, or I’d beat the shit out of you.

Antonio, it isn’t fair. Don’t lock me in again like that! she screamed. Suppose there was a fire—I couldn’t even shit if I had to—I couldn’t get to the WC—and with the baby—we’ve got to get another key!

"Petite, he said, lowering his voice. Excuse me. I didn’t mean to. I am absent-minded. I’m sorry. As for your coat—Elena has no coat. Do you know what it means to be cold because you have no money to buy a coat? No. No. You are rotten. You are spoiled by too much money!"

Ashamed, she looked away. He was right about the coat. He touched her again. His hands were shaking. She buried her face in his shoulder. Then, feeling an electric surge of energy, she got out of bed and put the Gershwin record on again. Come on, she said. Will you dance with me? She pulled him to his feet. He was still in his heavy jacket with a muffler around his neck. She wore her white flannel nightgown with tiny red roses. They whirled on the floor, cold to her bare feet. They whirled and whirled with the music.

Inside her the baby stirred. Quiet baby. Let me be. Give me some rest. As if it heard her, the baby quieted. Suddenly she felt very hungry, and she had a premotion that she must eat all she could because the baby would come soon, and even a bite of apple might make the difference between life and death. She pulled herself away from Antonio and went to the front room where there was a bowl of fruit. She took an apple to munch on, although it was difficult to swallow. But she forced herself to. She could feel the baby needed the nourishment. Brass instruments whirled the cells of her body in a waltz rhythm.

Françoise is the only one who gave us a gift, Antonio said. Still in his outdoor clothes, he was sitting on the edge of the bed. He drew her to him and stroked her hair and her shoulders. She is the only one. If the baby is a girl, I will give her the middle name of Françoise. Unashamedly, he was weeping.

CHAPTER TWO

Shortly after her marriage, Rosa decided she must find work. She cast off all thought of her physical condition. If she earned money, then perhaps Antonio would too. She had tried it once before in the early summer when she went to Hamburg, but that had been a foolish venture. That had failed. Now she would be more sensible.

She put a classified advertisement in the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune for general office work. On the day of her first job interview she rushed down the street trying to find Antonio. Her interview was at three